Beyond these resources, we could potentially use Google Scholar. A former terms of service/EULA of Google Scholar stated that: “You shall not, and shall not allow any third party to: […] (j) modify, adapt, translate, prepare derivative works from, decompile, reverse engineer, disassemble or otherwise attempt to derive source code from any Service or any other Google technology, content, data, routines, algorithms, methods, ideas design, user interface techniques, software, materials, and documentation; […] “crawl”, “spider”, index or in any non-transitory manner store or cache information obtained from the Service (including, but not limited to, Results, or any part, copy or derivative thereof); (m) create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product through use of or access to any of the Service or proprietary information related thereto“. Here is “create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service” a stopping point.

The Google Scholar terms document seems now to have been superseded by the all embracing Google Terms of Service. This document seems less restrictive: “Don’t misuse our Services” and “You may not use content from our Services unless you obtain permission from its owner or are otherwise permitted by law.” So it may be or may not be ok to crawl and/or use/republish the data from Google Scholar. See also a StackExchange question. and another StackExchange question.

The Google robots.txt limits automated access with the following relevant lines:

“/citations?user=” means that you are allowed to bot access the user profiles. Google Scholar user identifiers may be recorded in Wikidata by a dedicated property, so you could automatically access Google Scholar user profiles from the information in Wikidata.

So if there is some information you can get from Google Scholar is it worth it?

The Scholia code now adds a googlescholar.py module with some preliminary Google Scholar processing attempts. There is command-line based scraping of a researcher profile. For instance,

python -m scholia.googlescholar get-user-data gQVuJh8AAAAJ

It ain’t not working too well. As far as I can determine you need to page with JavaScript to get more than the initial 20 results (it would be interesting to examine the Publish or Perish software to see how a larger set of results is obtained). Not all bibliographic metadata is available for each item on the Google Scholar page – as far as I see: No DOI. No PubMed identifier. The author list may be abbreviated with an ellipsis (‘…’). Matching of the Google Scholar item with data already present in Wikidata seems not that straightforward.

It is worth remembering that Wikidata has the P4028 property to link to Google Scholar articles. There ain’t no many items using it yet though: 31. It was suggested by Vladimir Alexiev back in May 2017, but it seems that I am the only one using the property. Bot access to the link target provided by P4028 is – as far as I can see from the robots.txt – not allowed.

Wikicite is a project that focuses on sources in the Wikimedia universe. Currently, the most active part of Wikicite is the setup of bibliographic data from scientific articles in Wikidata with the tools of Magnus Manske, the Fatameh-duo and the GeneWiki people, and particular James Hare, Daniel Mietchen and Magnus Manske have been active in automatic and semi-automatic setup of data. Jakob Voß’ statistics says we have – as of medium October 2017 – metadata from almost 10 million publications in Wikidata and recorded over 36 million citation between the described works.

Given that so many bibliographic items have been setup in Wikidata it may be worth to ask whether we actually have a schema for the setup of this data. While we surely have sort-of a convention that tools and editors follow it is not complete and probably up for change.

Here are some Wikicite-related schema issues:

What instance is a scientific article? Most tools use instance of Q13442814, currently “scientific article” in English. But what is this? In English “scientific” means something different than the usual translation into Danish (“videnskabelig”) or German (“wissenschaftlicher“), – and these words are used in the labels of Q13442814. “Scientific” usually only entails natural science, leaving out social science and the humanities (while “videnskabelig”/”wissenschaftlicher” entails social science and humanities too). An attempt to fix this problem is to call these articles “scholarly articles”. It is interesting to think that what is one of the most used classes in Wikidata – if not the most used class – has an language ambiguity. I see no reason to restricted Q13442814 to only the English sense of science. It is all too difficult to distinguish between scientific disciplines: Think of computational humanities.

What about the ontology of scientific work? Currently, Q13442814 is set as a subclass of academic journal articles, but this is not how we use it as conference articles in proceedings are set to Q13442814. Is a so-called abstract a “scientific article”? “Abstracts” appear, e.g., in neuroimaging conferences, where they are full referenceable items published in proceedings or supplementary journal issues.

What is the instances of scientific article in Wikidata describing? A work or an edition? What happens if the article is reprinted (it happens to important work)? Should we then create a new item? Or amend the old item? If we create a new item then how should we link the two? Should we create a third item as a work item? Should items in preprint archives have their own item? Should that issue depend on whether the preprint version and the canonical version are more or less the same?

How do we represent an author? Today an author can be linked to the article via the P50 property. However, the author label may be different than the name written in the article (we may refer to this issue as the “Natalie Portman Problem” as she published a scientific article as “Natalie Hershlag”). P1932 as a qualifier to P50 may be used to capture the way that the name is represented in the article, – a possible solution. Recently, Manske’s author name resolver has started to copy the short author name to the qualifier under P50. For referencing, there is still the problem that the referencing software would likely need to determine the surname, and this is not trival for authors with suffixes and Spanish authors with multiple surnames.

How do we record the affiliation of a paper. Publicly funded universities and other research entities would like to make statistics on, for instance, the paper production, but this is not possible to do precisely with today’s Wikidata as papers are usually not affiliated with organizations, – only indirectly by the author affiliation. And the author affiliation might change as the author moves between different institutions. We already noted this problem in the first article we wrote about Scholia.

How do record the type of scientific publication? There are various subtypes, e.g., systematic review, original article, erratum, “letter”, etc. Or the state of the article: submitted, under-review, peer-review, not peer-reviewed. The “genre” and the “instance of” properties can be used, but I have seen no ruling convention.

How do we record what software and which datasets have been used in the article, e.g., for digital preservation. Currently, we are using “used” (P2283). But should we have dedicated properties, e.g., “uses software“? Do we have a schema for datasets and software?

How do we record the formatting of the title, e.g., case? Bibliographic reference management software may choose to capitalize some words. In BibTeX you have the possibility to format the title using LaTeX commands. Detailed formatting of titles in Wikidata is currently not done, and I do not believe we have dedicated properties to handle such cases.

How do we manage journals that change titles? For instance, for BMJ we have several items covering the name changes: Q546003, Q15746654, and Q28464921. Is this how we should do? There is the P156 property to connect subsequent versions.

How should we handle series of conference proceedings? A particular article can be “published in” a proceedings and such a proceedings may be part of a “series” that is a “conference proceedings series“. However, according to my recollection some/one(?) Wikidata bot may link articles directly as “published in” the conference proceedings series: they can have ISSNs and look like ordinary scientific journals.

When is an article published? You have a number of publishers setting a formal publication date in the future for an article that is actually published prior to that formal date. In Wikidata there is to my knowledge only a single property for publication date. Preprints yield other publication dates.

Scholia is mostly a web service developed from GitHub at https://github.com/fnielsen/scholia in an open source fashion. It was inspired by discussions at the WikiCite 2016 meeting in Berlin. Anyone can contribute as long as their contribution is under GPL.

Users can download the code and run the web service from their own computer if they have a Python Flask development environment. Otherwise the canonical web site for Scholia is https://tools.wmflabs.org/scholia/ which anyone with an Internet connection should be able to view.

The Scholia web application was an extension of these initial static pages so a profile page for any researcher or any organization could be made on the fly. And now it is no longer just authors and organizations where there is a profile page, but also works, venues (journals or proceedings), series, publishers, sponsors (funders) and awards. We have also “topics” and individual pages showing specialized information about chemicals, proteins, diseases and biological pathways. A rudimentary search interface is implemented.

The content of the web pages of Scholia with plots and tables are made from queries to the Wikidata Query Service, – the extended SPARQL endpoint provided by the Wikimedia Foundation. We also pull in text from the introduction of the articles in the English Wikipedia. We modify the table output of the Wikidata Query Service so individual items displayed in table cells link back to other items in Scholia.

Working with Scholia has been a great way to explore what is possible with SPARQL and Wikidata. One plot that I like is the “Co-author-normalized citations per year” plot on the organization pages. There is an example on this page: https://tools.wmflabs.org/scholia/organization/Q24283660. Here the citations to works authored by authors affiliated with the organization in question are counted and organized in a colored bar chart with respect to year of publication, – and normalized for the number of coauthors. The colored bar charts have been inspired by the “LEGOLAS” plots of Shubhanshu Mishra and Vetle Torvik.

Part of the Python Scholia code will also work as a command-line script for reference management in the LaTeX/BIBTeX environment using Wikidata as the backend. I have used this Scholia scheme for a couple of scientific papers I have written in 2017. The particular script is currently not well developed, so users would need to be indulgent.

Scholia relies on users adding bibliographic data to Wikidata. Tools from Magnus Manske are a great help as are Fatameh of “T Arrow” and “Tobias1984” and the WikidataIntegrator of the GeneWiki people. Daniel Mietchen, James Hare and a user called “GZWDer” have been very active adding much of the science bibligraphic information and we are now past 2.3 million scientific articles on Wikidata. You can count them with this link: https://tinyurl.com/yaux3uac

The coverage of different researcher profile sites and their citation statistics varies. Google Scholar seems to be the site with the largest coverage, – it even crawls and indexes my slides. The open Wikidata is far from there, but may be the only one with machine-readable free access and advanced search.

Below is the citation statistics in the form of the h-index from five different services.

Semantic Scholar does not give an overview of the citation statistics, and the count is somewhat hidden on the individual article pages. I attempted as best as I could to determine the value, but it might be incorrect.

I made a similar statistics on 8 May 2017 and reported it on the slides Wikicite (page 42). During the one and a half month since that count, the statistics for Scopus has change from 20 to 22.

Semantic Scholar is run by the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a non-profit research institute, so they may be interested in opening up their data for search. An API does, to my knowledge, not (yet?) exist, but they have a gentle robots.txt. It is also possible to download the full Semantic Scholar corpus from http://labs.semanticscholar.org/corpus/. (Thanks to Vladimir Alexiev for bringing my attention to this corpus).